Hummingbird Ventures

Glen Gowers, Ph.D., Basecamp Research cofounder and CEO, spoke about drug discovery at the 2024 Forbes Healthcare Summit in New York City. #ForbesHealth https://trib.al/aVWj2tF

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Hummingbird’s Analyst Program—a unique, two-year venture into the world of early-stage, high conviction investing. The inaugural cohort will be based in London for the first year, and invites bold, curious minds to join our investment team, working alongside founders and investors to uncover and support the next wave of groundbreaking technology. Applications close on November 22nd. More details: https://lnkd.in/eZXt_qWh

We’re thrilled to announce the launch of Hummingbird’s Analyst Program—a unique, two-year venture into the world of early-stage, high conviction investing. The inaugural cohort will be based in London for the first year, and invites bold, curious minds to join our investment team, working alongside founders and investors to uncover and support the next wave of groundbreaking technology. Applications close on November 22nd. More details: https://lnkd.in/eZXt_qWh

We’re honoured to be named one of Bloomberg's 'Top 25 UK Startups to Watch'. Mia Dawkins, Yazhou Sun and Amy Thomson have captured a snapshot of one of the most dynamic and diverse ecosystems in the world and it's a privilege to be featured alongside companies such as Wayve, LabGenius, Cleo, Isometric, CuspAI and many others that are tackling tough challenges with best-in-class innovations. Thank you Bloomberg for the recognition and congratulations to all who made the list! 🎉 #COP16 #AI #biotech #drugdiscovery

We're excited to announce a series of milestones: Basecamp Research and the laboratory of Dr. David R. Liu at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard are collaborating on new approaches to genetic medicines. Basecamp Research also has completed a $60 million Series B financing that will go towards scaling the pace and volume of our data collection, as well as strengthening our AI capabilities. Singular led the financing round. Additional investors include S32, redalpine, Change Forces, André Hoffmann, Vice-Chairman of Roche, Feike Sijbesma, Chair of Royal Philips and Former CEO of DSM, and Paul Polman, former CEO of Unilever. Returning investors include True Ventures and Hummingbird Ventures.   And ... as part of our expansion, a big welcome goes to biotech veteran Anupama Hoey who joins our team as Chief Commercial Officer, bringing 20 years of leadership experience. A link to the press release is in the comments below.    #biotechnology #drugdiscovery #financing

A future where we can support millions of people living on the Moon or Mars is far more exciting than one where that possibility doesn’t exist. At today's cost of transporting crew + cargo to the surface of Mars, establishing a serious base in space would cost more than the combined GDP of the entire world. A multi-order magnitude cost reduction is essential to make an exciting multi-planet future possible. Today Starpath is announcing over $11M in total funding to bring that multi-planet future closer to reality. We’re building commercial scale propellant production factories for the surface of the Moon and Mars. Access to abundant propellant on the surface enables fully-reusable mission profiles, where no costly spacecraft hardware is expended per-flight. This both drives down cost and enables payloads to be returned to Earth - a critical capability for servicing a high volume of crewed flights to and from the Moon and Mars. Starpath is the core surface infrastructure for cities in space. In the long term, our technology will service thousands of regularly scheduled flights with propellant and enable humanity’s first ever self-sustaining civilization in space. Human civilization should strive to reach the galactic high-score of all civilizations that ever were, and we won’t do so as a boring one planet species. Join the team and come help us reach the high score! https://lnkd.in/g8kyTTEh Thanks to Aria Alamalhodaei at TechCrunch for covering our story: https://lnkd.in/g8SPDVpF Thanks to our incredible investors: 8VC, Fusion Fund, Balerion Space Ventures, Valhalla Ventures, Hummingbird Ventures, Day One Ventures, Contrary, Jason Portnoy, Justin Rose, Lu Zhang, Shane Wall, Ryan JB Taylor, Daniel W., Phil Scully, Rohan Pujara, Devan Malhotra, Haya Hanna, Barend Van den Brande, Masha Bucher, Matt Mickiewicz, Tara Harandi-Zadeh, Jason Chen, Daniel Maren

Decoding Bio’s AI x Bio Summit 2024 is a wrap! 300 attendees, 3 panels, 1 fireside chat, 13 roundtables later, we couldn’t be more energized about what is coming in the new generation of life science companies. The Summit's mission is to foster meaningful conversations within the ecosystem, moving beyond the polarized debates. The field is marred with easy, extreme positions: “AI companies don’t understand biology” or “AI is a paradigm shift and is revolutionizing drug discovery”. The truth is that whilst these are extreme examples, they’re not bold or contrarian opinions; they’re the easy way out of a real conversation. It is clear that the answer is nuanced, and the Summit’s speakers and attendees demonstrated this. Our hope is that, in the future, an AI x Bio Summit will no longer be necessary: that pharma executives, industry scientists, academia, startup founders and execs, late-stage and public equity investors and the venture ecosystem can seamlessly discuss how AI can better serve patients and the planet. To paraphrase Amit Etkin from Alto Neuroscience: "Hopefully, in the future, we won't need AI conferences, but simply conferences where we discuss patient outcomes." The AI in Pharma panel with Greg Meyers (Bristol Myers Squibb), Cynthia Hong, (Novartis), Shameer Khader, (Sanofi) and Guang Yang, (McKinsey & Company) showcased how AI has permeated various departments due to its real utility. It demonstrated that pharmaceutical companies are not the innovation-averse incumbents as often perceived and have a defined vision for what they want to build, buy, or partner with. The Foundation Models in Biology panel with Tom Sercu (EvolutionaryScale), Philipp Lorenz (Basecamp Research), Matej Macak (QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey), Ali Madani (Profluent) and Renee Y. (NVIDIA) discussed how new models are enabling us to design, rather than discover new biology. The Building a Biotech in 2024 panel with Sajith Wickramasekara (Benchling), Michael Nally (Generate:Biomedicines) and Bigyan Bista (Enveda Biosciences) showed us that it is critical to their businesses, but it won't replace wet lab experimentation anytime soon. I wanted to thank the incredible co-hosts Amee Kapadia (Cantos) and Eric J. Dimise, & Johanna (Rodriguez) Grossman, (NYSE), our sponsors who made it possible (Amazon Web Services (AWS), Bunsen, HSBC, McKinsey & Company and Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP), all the speakers and roundtable leads who generously offered their time and wisdom, as well as all the attendees that came for the day. Until next year!

Basecamp Research CTO Philipp Lorenz will speak about Foundation Models in Biology and Fact vs. Fiction in GenAI for Bio at Decoding Bio's AI x Bio Summit this week at the NYSE

Less than two weeks to go until Decoding Bio’s AI x Bio Summit 2024 at the NYSE Amee and I are thrilled to host a distinguished set of speakers: Ali Madani (Profluent), Amit Etkin (Alto Neuroscience), Bigyan Bista (Enveda Biosciences), Cynthia Hong (Novartis), Greg Meyers (Bristol Myers Squibb), Guang Yang, (McKinsey & Company), Matej Macak (QuantumBlack, AI by McKinsey), Michael Nally (Generate:Biomedicines), Nabiha Saklayen (Cellino), Philipp Lorenz (Basecamp Research), Renee Y. (NVIDIA), Sajith Wickramasekara (Benchling), Tom Sercu (EvolutionaryScale) & Ziv Bar-Joseph (Sanofi) The event is generously sponsored by McKinsey & Company, HSBC, Orrick Tech & Amazon Web Services (AWS) in collaboration with NYSE (Johanna and Eric) and Bunsen. The conference is now full, but if you’d like to attend the evening reception, please register your interest by joining the waitlist here: https://lu.ma/f8akt3fh

Former MIT graduates launch spatial biology-focused startup to test hundreds of CAR-T cell therapies at once in mice. Check out my exclusive story for Endpoints News on the launch of Waypoint Bio, founded and led by Xinchen Wang and David Phizicky. https://lnkd.in/esuPUJak #biotech #startup #CART #CARTcelltherapy #celltherapy #spatialbiology #pooledscreening #invivomodels #mousemodels #preclinical #cancer #oncology #autoimmunedisease